Lack of diversity doesn’t diminish ‘Sex and the City’ appeal

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Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha. All names that decidedly are Anglo-Saxon and old-fashioned. How many black women with the aforementioned names do you know? Yet multitudes of 20-to 40-something year-old African-American women (and probably women belonging to other racial groups, too) recite the Sex and the City’s characters’ names with a warmth and ease befitting their BFF’s.

Whether it’s Carrie’s relationship with Big, the guy she finally married in the first Sex film two years ago, outrageous shopping sprees, or Samantha’s endless sexually charged antics, African-American women appear smitten with the former HBO series that ended several years ago only to resurface in blockbuster films. Indeed, groups of African-American women in major cities plan highly orchestrated events to coincide with the film’s opening today.

Despite Sex and the City’s popularity among black women, questions linger as to why Girlfriends, a television series that featured four attractive black women and story lines similar to Sex and the City , never made it beyond cable. Several women who plan to see the movie offered their theories that included not only race and sex, but also the character’s relatability.

“In most cases, race always matters,” says Anita Carter, a 53-year-old single executive who lives in Alexandria, Va. “I do not believe the movie industry is at all interested in making a movie about black women because black women do not appeal to larger audiences as white women do.”

Carter, who does not have elaborate plans for the new movie, except to see it alone, adds that she routinely watched Sex and the City on television when nothing else was on and became a fan because she admires how ‘real’ the characters were with one another. She enjoyed “Girlfriends” for the same reason, she says.

Tamika Lamison, a 41-year old actress who lives in Los Angeles and heads the company, Make a Film Foundation, said she believes the series and films are popular among black women because they talk about and explore sex so openly without any apparent judgment.

“We, as black people, for the most part, still don’t seem comfortable talking in great detail about sex or sexual exploits. I think our elders still think sex is sacred in a way that it hasn’t been embraced or portrayed for a long time and certainly not expressed as sacred in the actual goings-on in most of society. So Sex and the City is a ‘guilty’ pleasure. Just a theory.”

Chinae Massenberg, 40, two years ago organized a group of 27 African-American women to view the film in Richmond, Va. Admitting that the group was too large, she plans to see it with about eight friends tonight. She says that while it would be nice to see Girlfriends on the big screen, she doubts that it would be as successful because it did not have the same crossover appeal as Sex and the City.

“I don’t think a lot of white women watched it, maybe because Girlfriends was on a black network,” she says.

Patrick L. Riley, a New York -based pop culture critic and television producer and writer, notes that the overall premise of Sex and the City is a group of white women dealing with the shortage of men in New York City. Black women, he says, have long experienced a drought of available black men.

“So misery loves company, especially when it is sporting haute couture and sipping on a Cosmopolitan.”